Fotoeins Fotografie

Fotoeins Friday at Vancouver AG: Lisa Hilli

By HL fotoeins on 24 Jan 2020

Above/featured: Sisterhood Lifeline (2018).

Lisa Hilli: Gunantuna (Papua New Guinea).

‘Sisterhood Lifeline’ assembles a standard office cubicle in the gallery; large wallpapers feature First Nations vavine (women) in stark white spaces, exchanging discreet gestures of comfort. An audio recording on the office telephone recounts real-life situations experienced by the artist’s friends and colleagues in the workplace, which reveal the in/visibility of their bodies, voices, and agency. This work engages with Indigenous power and presence within the context of Eurocentric cultural institutions wherein vavine – considered here beyond binary constructions of gender – must hold space and make way for their communities. The term “sisterhood lifeline” is borrowed from Areej Nur, a writer and producer at 3CR Community Radio in Melbourne, Australia.

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“Transits and Returns” presents the work of 21 Indigenous artists whose practices are both rooted in the specificities of their cultures and routed via their travels. These forces of situatedness and mobility work in synergy and in tension with one another, shaping the multiple ways of understanding and being Indigenous today. Within the exhibition, these dual realities are explored through themes of movement, territory, kinship and representation, with many artworks inhabiting multiple categories. The resulting presentation foregrounds the creative sovereignty of each artist to determine their own articulations of the world, while also exploring the resonances between them.

Featuring artists from local First Nations, as well as those from communities located throughout the Pacific region (ranging from Alutiiq territory in the north to Māori lands in the south, with many mainland and island Nations in between), Transits and Returns traces wide-ranging experiences that are inclusive of both ancestral knowledges and global connections.

The descriptions are directly from the Vancouver Art Gallery where Lisa Hilli’s work is on exhibition until 23 February 2020.

I made the photo above on 15 Oct 2019 with a Fujifilm X70 fixed-lens prime (18.5/28) with the following settings: 1/100-sec, f/4, and ISO4000. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-g4L.